Beyond 5G: The Two Biggest Challenges for India's Internet

isp-column

The recent debate around Airtel’s priority 5G generated plenty of noise. Personally, I’m not a fan of it either but Airtel and Jio are private companies. Their job is to maximise shareholder value, not to maintain market competition. The real question is why competition remains so limited. And by competition, I don’t mean another mobile operator. I mean fixed-line broadband.


Two long-standing problems continue to hold India’s internet ecosystem back.


1. Every ISP builds its own last mile

In the early days of FTTH this was understandable. In 2026, it feels increasingly wasteful.

At my home in Haryana, around a dozen FTTH providers are available. The pole outside carries 14 fibre cables from different operators — all solving the same problem independently. The last mile isn’t where ISPs differentiate. Fibre from ISP A isn’t inherently “faster” than fibre from ISP B. The real differentiation is in the network behind that fibre capacity, routing, peering, resilience and customer support. Yet every provider continues deploying duplicate infrastructure. Even Airtel and Jio increasingly push Fixed Wireless Access because expanding FTTH remains expensive.

Instead of parallel deployments, we should encourage neutral last-mile infrastructure. A small number of regulated fibre providers could deploy high core count cables, while ISPs lease strands and compete on service quality rather than digging the same streets repeatedly. This will also help in fixing streets which look quite ugly with excess fibre routing in all directions.

Earlier this year, Stefan Schüller published an excellent article, The Free Market Lie: Why Switzerland Has 25 Gbit Internet and America Doesn’t comparing broadband infrastructure in Switzerland, the US and Germany. It’s well-researched and provides useful context for many of the points discussed here.I do disagree with one aspect of the article - its comparison of Passive Optical Networks (PON) and Active Optical Networks (AON). Contention exists throughout the internet, from access networks to the application layer. Networks are engineered with reasonable headroom, but oversubscription is a fundamental part of how the internet operates. So I don’t believe PON is inherently the limitation it’s sometimes portrayed to be. That said, it’s still an insightful read about the topic.


2. Wi-Fi is surprisingly difficult to share legally

India has fibre in many of the urban areas from homes to offices, but we don’t make full use of it. The biggest reason isn’t technology, it’s regulation and liability. Because ISPs must maintain subscriber and CGNAT logs for Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs), sharing a normal retail broadband connection publicly becomes legally risky. In practice, the compliant solution is managed Wi-Fi provided by a licensed ISP.

That’s why places like gyms, cafes or small businesses often avoid offering Wi-Fi even when a fibre connection is sitting right there for their own usage.

PM-WANI attempted to address this, but its focus evolved around commercial hotspot operators and it got projected more as a “make side money” scheme instead. It has many issues, some of which were covered by Mr Parag Kar in this video in Hindi last month. The bigger opportunity is making secure Wi-Fi sharing simple, not selling.


Centralised wifi authentication & logging

Imagine a nationwide authentication platform:

  • One-time user verification (both for the end user and for the person offering the Wi-Fi hotspot)
  • Certified Wi-Fi hardware that securely streams required logs to central infra (host gets a unique token when setting it up & the same is used to stream logs)
  • Seamless automatic connection across compliant hotspots with the end-user device holding a certificate to prove identity
  • No traffic tunnelling or unnecessary complexity

Homes, offices, hotels, cafes, gyms and other venues could legally offer Wi-Fi while preserving the audit trail required by law enforcement by just getting the compliant hardware and signing up with it.


The next leap probably isn’t faster 5G or 6G. It’s building shared infrastructure where duplication adds little value and removing regulatory friction that prevents existing connectivity from being used more effectively.